Development of FPGA based NURBS interpolator and motion controller with multiprocessor technique

The high-speed computational performance is gained at the cost of huge hardware resource, which restricts the application of high-accuracy algorithms because of the limited hardware cost in practical use. To solve the problem, a novel method for designing the field programmable gate array(FPGA)-based non-uniform rational B-spline(NURBS) interpolator and motion controller, which adopts the embedded multiprocessor technique, is proposed in this study. The hardware and software design for the multiprocessor, one of which is for NURBS interpolation and the other for position servo control, is presented. Performance analysis and experiments on an X-Y table are carried out, hardware cost as well as consuming time for interpolation and motion control is compared with the existing methods. The experimental and comparing results indicate that, compared with the existing methods, the proposed method can reduce the hardware cost by 97.5% using higher-accuracy interpolation algorithm within the period of 0.5 ms. A method which ensures the real-time performance and interpolation accuracy, and reduces the hardware cost significantly is proposed, and it’s practical in the use of industrial application.